Tomorrow, if the Lord wills, we shall say goodbye to 2021. I suppose if you asked folks to write a list of every disappointment, heartache, bad experience, and such like which they experienced this year, many people could draft a pretty sizeable list. Ask the same people to write down every blessing, pleasant surprise, and victory—whether large or small—and I wonder if those same ones might struggle to match the length of the negative list. Maybe not. I can only speak for myself.
I remember one in preaching school one of my instructors asked me to write a list of everything I didn’t like about myself. After that, I was told to make a list of every quality that I did enjoy about myself. I blazed through the first list, filling up the page with negativity, and then struggled to put into words anything in particular that was positive, beyond a few meaningless things to fill space.
I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one who has trouble loving self. I know it’s implied in the command of Jesus (Matthew 19:19), but it wouldn’t be the first command of my Master that I struggled obeying consistently. Going back to the first pair of lists: If I was asked to write a list of every disappointment in 2021, I could do so not only with great enumeration but also with great specificity. I could tell you exactly what happened, probably when it happened, and maybe even why it happened. On the other hand, my list of blessings, I’m ashamed to say, would probably include vague entries like “my health” or “my house.” That defeats the point of the exercise, though: What I ought to do is take an inventory of the specific blessings the Lord has given me. I find it hard, however: They don’t come to mind as effortlessly as the heartaches do.
If you’re curious, here’s a simple breakdown of every day I lived in 2021 (up to yesterday), marked with a single color to denote whether the day was great or terrible or something in between…
I can look back at that list and recall the week in January when I was terribly sick, and spent most of that time on my couch watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember a day in late May when a ton of stress and bottled-up anxiety finally broke me and I wept for a good two hours straight. I remember some bad days in October, when my kids were really struggling in school and I felt powerless to help.
I can point out the days that hurt me, but the days when I felt happy, content, and blessed are a blur. That’s on me. That’s what I need to work on next year.
Having said that, I’ll end with this: As I look at the days of my year, what I notice is how outnumbered the bad days are by the good. I may not be able to pluck out the reason every great day was a great day, but maybe that’s because I had so many of them this year, it’s hard to keep them all straight. I may not be able to recall as I should the specific blessings God has given me this year, but I can at least say—and thank God for it—that I am blessed.
I’ll try to remember that as I move into 2022 and I hope you will too.
~Matthew